Enova International × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
An August study.
Enova International lends from the middle of Chicago's Loop, at 175 W. Jackson Boulevard, and has done it at a scale that is hard to picture – past $72 billion funded, for more than fifteen million customers. The thing that made us like them is smaller than either number. Years ago their engineers rebuilt the decision engine at the heart of the company, a platform called Colossus, because the old one was a black box. The new one answers in under a second, and the people who run it can watch an answer move through it.
A company that treats visibility as a virtue, then hosts free evenings downtown so other engineers can see how the machine works, is a company we wanted to press into leather.
The mark, as found
The Enova mark is a wide, quiet lockup: the name set lowercase in deep navy, led by a rounded blue emblem that reads as a lowercase e built from two curved forms, with a clean white channel running straight through its middle. That channel is the whole brand in one gesture – a clear path through something complex. It also happens to be a shape that presses beautifully.
Pressed
The lockup is about three times longer than it is tall, so it runs the long way down a lengthwise luggage tag. We pressed it blind on a blueberry tag, the leather nearest the navy of the wordmark, and on a pale sea-blue one that carries the clear blue of the emblem. A third tag in gray sand stands in for the white ground the mark usually lives on. On screen the sea-blue leather reads softer and paler than the emblem's blue; we like the tag better for it. More than fifteen hundred people work at Enova, and a fair number of them fly – a tag like this says whose bag it is before any name card does.
The box, opened
Our first companion design comes straight from the Colossus story. We drew the black box the way its engineers defeated it: an engraved cube with one face removed, a decision path threading the interior through three small nodes and leaving by the far side as an arrow. Hatched faces give it the feel of an old patent plate, and the company name sits beneath in letterspaced capitals.
The tray comes in our golden-tan arizona leather, pressed blind. A valet tray is the honest piece of furniture on any desk or dresser, keys and badge in plain sight at the end of the day. A box that hides nothing seemed like the right thing to stamp on it.
Best answer wins
"Best Answer Wins" is one of Enova's named values, and it is the one that belongs on a notebook. We drew it as a round seal – the words circling the ring between two small stars, and at the center an engraved bulb whose filament bends into a little lowercase e. The best answer has to be written down somewhere before it can win, and more often than anyone admits, that somewhere is paper.
The journals travel as a pair, the seal pressed generously into the lower right corner of each: one in black, where the unfoiled press reads as a quiet shadow relief, and one in pale gray sand, the color of an unwritten page.
The key to 175 W. Jackson
Chicago runs deep here. The headquarters sits on Jackson Boulevard, and Enova keeps showing up at the city's meetups and hack nights. So the keychain mark is a Loop placard in miniature – the six-pointed star from the city's flag, cut into facets like a stone, set over the street address. A key with that fob knows where it lives.
The fobs come as a pair, one in blueberry pressed blind. The other is black, and black is where the gold lives in this study – foil pressed into the fob the way the old towers letter their brass.
One tick after the start
Enova's culture page gives the operating line "Be Bold and Move Fast," and the engineering claim behind it is concrete – model decisions returned in under a second. The last design takes the phrase at its word: a stopwatch whose hand has moved one tick past twelve, the sliver of a spent second marked at the center of the dial. It presses as a maker's mark into the lower right corner of the toiletry bag, the piece that gets packed the night before a conference.
The bags stack blueberry over dark espresso, both pressed blind – toiletry bags never take foil in our shop, and these two leathers wear a plain press well.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Enova International and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.